Course Information

The LTI colloquium is a series of talks related to language technologies. The topics include but are not restricted to Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Information Retrieval, Computational Biology, Machine Learning, Text Mining, Knowledge Representation, Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Intelligent Language Tutoring. To get credit of the course, students are required to write either a short critique of one of the presentations or a comparison of two.

Time:

 Fridays 2:30-3:50pm

Location:

 7500 Wean Hall

Instructor:

 Bhiksha Raj, bhiksha (at) cs.cmu.edu

TA:

 Pallavi Baljekar, pbaljeka (at) cs.cmu.edu

 

UpComing talk

 

May 3rd, Friday, 2:30pm

Krishna Bharat

Google Research

Google News: Helping Billions Access News

 

About ten years ago I started a research project at Google to organize all of the world's news content by story and rank stories algorithmically. This required a brand new approach to indexing and ranking real time content, and was turned into a product called GoogleNews. Since then Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content. In this talk I will describe the history of the product, and discuss the technologies and challenges underlying Google News. Also, some of our practical learnings and directions for future research  

 

Bio:

Krishna Bharat is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Google and founder of Google News, working in the area of Web search and computational journalism. He joined Google in 1999 and helped start the research group. Google News won the 2003 Webby Award in thenews category, and Dr. Bharat received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. In 2004 he founded Google’s R&D operations in India and served as the center’s first director until 2006. Before joining Google in 1999, he was a member of the research staff at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. 

 

SCHEDULE

Date

Speaker

Host

Title of the Talk

Talk Information

Jan 18

Izhak Shafran

Florian Metze

Assessment of Social Engagement and Cognitive Function for Studying Aging

[slides] [video]

Jan 25

----------Admissions Meeting (No Colloquium) ----------

-------------------

Feb 1

Wei Tong

Alex Hauptman

A Kernel Density Based Approach for Large Scale Image Retrieval and Its Application to Tattoo Identification

[slides] [video]

Feb 8

Dan Ellis

Florian Metze

----------CANCELLED---------

-------------------

Feb 15

John R. Hershey

John McDonough

Non-negative dynamical system models for speech and audio

[slides] [video]

Feb 22

Alex Smola

Yiming Yang

The Parameter Server

[slides] [video]

March 1

Josh McDermott

Bhiksha Raj

Understanding Audition Via Sound Analysis and Synthesis

[slides] [video]

March 8

----------Mid Sems (No Colloquium) ----------

-------------------

March 15

----------Spring Break (No Colloquium) ----------

-------------------

March 22

Chenxiang Zhai

Jamie Callan

Axiomatic Analysis and Optimization of Information Retrieval Models

[slides] [video]

March 29

Julia Hockenmaier

Noah Smith

Learning to Describe Images in Natural Language

[slides] [video]

April 5

Carolyn Rose

Summarization of Behavior Trajectories in Online Health Support Groups

[slides] [video]

April 12

David Traum

Florian Metze

Non-cooperative and Deceptive Dialogue

[slides] [video]

April 19

----------Spring Carnival (No Colloquium) ----------

-------------------

April 26

Marta Recasens

Ed Hovy

Taking Coreference Resolution beyond the 60% Performance Barrier

[slides][videos]

May 3

Krishna Bharat

Bhiksha Raj

About Google News

video up on black board (against company policy to share the slides and video publicly).